Game Progress Update #36

Hello World! Welcome once again to another Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

In this update, I’ve spent some time thinking about how best to do the daily bonus screen, I’ve created and tried to upload another build of the game, and as always these days I’ve been battling suspicious activity on the website.

Daily Bonus Screen

When I originally planned the Daily bonus, I was thinking of a spinning prize wheel, but I don’t think this idea translates too well into a low res pixel art style.

Instead I decided to try and implement a scratch card style bonus, where you are presented with a six panel scratch card and you win a prize if you match 3 symbols.

I’ve seen the scratch card approach in a few games, but the most memorable one is from Dice with Buddies by Scopely.

The video at the top of the page shows an attempt at creating a scratch card effect. This is based on code from the TGC forums posted by Kevin Cross.

Uploading to Google Play

After the promising start I got off to in the last Game Update, I’m afraid I’m still no further along to getting Flappy-vaders uploaded and ready for testing.

As you can see from the screen grab, when I went to upload the .aab, it threw up an error because I had used a key store which I had used to publish other .apks.

This is the first time I’ve tried publishing using an Android App Bundle (aab) rather than the old style Android Package Kit (apk) files.

Still, It’s a fairly easy task to create a new keystore file specifically for this.

Website Security

I’m still finding I’m getting a few hundred sign ups to the Dev with Dave website which are suspicious at best. I was hoping that the reintroduction of the reCaptcha on the signup form would have been enough to stop it, but sadly that has not worked.

I did try a different approach, with a new security plugin, but again it seems to have not made a dent in the spammers signing up.

I’m going to try and add email verification next. Where you have to authenticate the account by clicking a ink in an email which the website sends to new signups. This has proven effective on other websites I’ve been involved with recently.

And that’s all for now

I’ll no doubt be back in two weeks with another Game progress update. I expect I’ll have the test build uploaded to the play store, so please, if you haven’t already joined the test program, drop me an email or message and I’ll let you know how to join up.

Dave